My literary return

My team of physicians has granted me tentative permission to use pen and paper.

They have not, however, granted me permission to keep a diary, especially not one allowed into the public via this perilously revelatory forum. Thus, I pen these words in secret, early in the morn -- only the servants are awake at this dark hour, diligently preparing today's bread and terrine of Rouennais duckling.

Papá has said that all the romantic literature I read goes to my head -- I previously scoffed at this notion, but perhaps there is some truth in his pronouncement. 'Tis not only a well-accepted tenet of decent society, but a fact reinforced and documented by modern psychiatric science, that the female mind is more excitable than that of her sterner counterpart, that it is more easily swayed by passions, more easily tempted by evil, less able to comprehend what is in her own best interest; the female is more apt to be tantrum-prone, and to overestimate her own capacity to cope with matters intellectual. Exposure to ideas and theories is likely to reduce her to a sobbing heap of neurotic flesh and hard, arid uterus. None of this is in dispute; both convention and empirical evidence are in agreement on this. The dilemma arises from attempting to quell the thirst within me to learn, to explore the unsavory areas of life and the mind. It is not a healthy thirst, merely a natural one. Yet man (and woman, dare I say) has conquered nature before. If the hand of man can craft the gleaming metropolis of Man-hattan out of nothing but savage wilds,



then why shouldn't I be able to suppress my inherent urges? I can find solace in the fact that Horace is a bold navigator of the mind, and that I am a part of him. I may allow him to delve into literary matters, while I step aside and tend to the partaking of petit fours with other society ladies.